George Clooney remains behind the camera for ‘Suburbicon’

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Oct 19, 2017 at 10:35 AMOct 19, 2017 at 10:35 AM

Ed Symkus More Content Now

Mention George Clooney to different people, and you’re likely to get all sorts of different responses. “Oh, yeah, he got his start as that handsome doctor on ‘ER’.” “Did you know that he was on a show called ‘E/R’ in the ’80s and then did ‘ER’ a decade later?” “He got his start on the TV show ‘The Facts of Life’.” “He was the worst Batman ever.” “I like his funny stuff, like ‘The Descendants,’ better than any of his serious stuff.”

Sure, everyone knows his acting, but hardly anyone brings up his directing, a skill at which he’s getting better and better. Among his feature films, he had mixed results with “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” he had no clue what to do with “Leatherheads,” and he did some fine work on “The Ides of March.” But his best directing yet is seen in the new crime thriller-black comedy mix “Suburbicon,” based partly on a decades-old script by Joel and Ethan Coen, that was updated and added to by Clooney and his producing partner Grant Heslov. It stars Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, and Oscar Isaac. The Coens’ story is, no surprise, about a murder-gone-wrong. The Clooney-Heslov part takes a cue from a nasty racial incident that happened in Levittown, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s.

Q: This is really two movies in one. How did the murder story get attached to the racism story?A: Grant and I were looking at a piece about an event that happened in Levittown. We’d also seen some things on the (presidential) campaign trail about building fences and scapegoating Mexicans and Muslims, and we’re always reminded that these aren’t new things and new moments in our history. We thought it would be interesting to talk about that, but we wanted it to be entertaining; we didn’t want it to be a documentary. So, we merged that story with (the Coens’) “Suburbicon” because we thought it was a funny idea to put it in the suburbs in the 1950s when we all thought everything was so perfect, if you were a white, straight male (laughs).

Q: Is it true that at one point, the Coens were going to direct their script, and you were going to be in it?A: Yeah, in 1999, they had offered me to play the part that Oscar Isaac now plays, but that film never got made.

Q: They were on quite a roll by 1999. Why didn’t they make the film, and when did it come to you?A: I think they started writing it in the mid-80s. But later, they’d already done films along the same themes. They’d done “Fargo” and “Burn After Reading.” So, they didn’t want to do this one. Also, the third act didn’t really exist, they changed a few things, some other writers had come on for a while, and it just never got made. We talked to Joel and Ethan about two years ago for the first time about doing it.

Q: You have a combination of a twisted Coen Brothers crime caper and a tense but refined story of early civil rights, with white people upset that a black family has moved to their neighborhood. What was your plan for balancing all of that?A: It was tricky. While we were shooting, (Donald) Trump was elected and that changed some of the temperature of the film in a weird way. The country got angrier. No matter which side you were on, the country got angrier, and it reminded us that we had to play with the tone a little differently. We had to cut out some scenes. We had to tone down some of the slapstick with the killers; we had to make them a little more dangerous. One of the funniest characters, played by Josh Brolin, was cut out of the film because it just didn’t fit anymore. In general, tone is what you win or lose on in films, particularly when you’re playing in this kind of genre.

Q: There’s still some funny stuff, but this is a very dark film. Was there any particular part that was most difficult to direct?A: The trickiest part was we were shooting in a very racially diverse neighborhood in Fullerton, California, and we had about 350 extras who were going to hurl a lot of racial slurs (at the black family), and say a lot of pretty terrible things that are against any decent human being’s idea of what you would think is OK. So, it was having to say to everyone, “OK, we’re going to do something really awful, and it’s gonna feel terrible.” And everyone who was there, the actors, the crew, everyone, we all just felt sick when we were doing it. These were things that really happened, but it was sickening to be part of it. I think that was the most difficult thing to shoot.

“Suburbicon” opens on Oct. 27.

— Ed Symkus writes about movies for More Content Now. He can be reached at esymkus@rcn.com.

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